Gina Ligon is the founder and director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE), which is the DHS Center of Excellence for Terrorism Prevention and Counterterrorism Research from 2020-2030. She is the Jack and Stephanie Koraleski Professor for Collaboration Science in the College of Business at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Ligon has served on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence panels for the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She regularly briefs the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and other federal organizations on terrorist leadership, organizational structure, and capacity for malevolent innovation.

She serves on the advisory board of CREST, the U.K.-based Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. Ligon has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed publications related to terrorist organizations, and she has had federal funding for her research since 2008. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of the Psychology of Terrorism, and she was the former editor of the scholarly journal Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward Terrorism and Genocide.

Prior to joining the University of Nebraska at Omaha, she was a full-time psychology faculty member at Villanova University. She also worked as a director of leadership consulting at St. Louis-based Psychological Associates.

As a native Oklahoman and military wife, she is determined to use her training to degrade international and domestic threat actors from harming Americans.